THE STUDENT'S DORMITORY IN KICKIEGO STREET (Akademik na Kickiego)

The purpose of this article is to outline an anthropological portrait of the Warsaw University Students' Dormitory no. 3 in 9/12 Kickiego Street - a place which in the course of its fifty years-long existence has become surrounded with numerous 'urban legends' and for many residents of Warsaw has made a permanent and indelible imprint on the map of the town. One of the elements of the Dormitory's real or imaginary exceptionality is its location on the right bank of the Vistula, in the very heart of Grochow, traditionally regarded as a workers' district, whose social label clearly differed from the one ascribed to the future 'elite of the nation', i. e. the students. The prime object of the authoress' interest are the eventual developments along the meeting point of those two communities, and the manner in which the Dormitory in Kickiego Street has for years remained a fragment of the space of the Praga South district. The point of departure for the ensuing analysis are the categories of 'homelessness and liminality in reference to the status of a student - mutually compatible albeit formulated by two different authors. The first part of the article concentrates on the traces of the presence of these categories in different spheres of collective life. The following part tries to indicate certain focal points which concentrated, or still do, the construction of the identity of a place.